1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to multimedia communication and presentation.
2. Related Art
In computer systems for communicating and presenting data, it is desirable to communicate and present data in a multiplicity of media. Such communication is sometimes called xe2x80x9cmultimedia communication.xe2x80x9d For example, these media can include text, sound, pictures, animation, and combinations thereof. One advantage of multimedia communication is that it can more vividly communicate messages to recipients.
One problem in the known art is that multimedia elements comprise significant amounts of data, and are therefore difficult to construct from xe2x80x9cscratchxe2x80x9d (that is, from basic elements) and difficult to enter into a computer system. This problem is acute for pictures and similar graphical elements, which must generally be xe2x80x9ccapturedxe2x80x9d using video equipment. For example, it would be desirable for users to be able to enter picture data into messages for sending, such as when using electronic chat or electronic mail systems. However, known electronic chat systems do not provide this capability, and known electronic mail systems provide only techniques by which pictures that have already been captured using other equipment can be attached to electronic mail messages and transmitted.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a system in which multimedia elements can easily be entered and modified, especially in real time. This advantage is achieved in a system in which multimedia elements are associated with keystroke or mouse abbreviations so as to be easily entered from a keyboard or mouse, and in which properties of both individual multimedia elements and an ensemble of multimedia elements can be edited to alter the presentation of those multimedia elements.
The invention provides a system for entry and modification of multimedia elements for communication and presentation. Abbreviations, each comprising a sequence of one or more keystrokes or mouse actions (such as the typed word xe2x80x9cflowerxe2x80x9d) are associated with individual multimedia elements (such as a picture of a flower), so that a human operator can enter those multimedia elements using a keyboard or mouse. Each multimedia element has properties (such as size, complexity, or detail), which can be modified once the multimedia element has been entered (such as altering the flower from a relatively smaller picture to a relatively larger picture). The set of individual multimedia elements is collected into an ensemble, which can itself have properties that can be modified. One such property of the ensemble is a xe2x80x9ctheme,xe2x80x9d which applies to a plurality of multimedia elements in the ensemble and presents a variant of each multimedia element consistent with the theme (such as representing the flower as a cactus in a xe2x80x9cWesternxe2x80x9d theme, or as a rose in a xe2x80x9cRomanticxe2x80x9d theme).
In a preferred embodiment, the multimedia editor is included with a communication system for sending and receiving electronic chat and electronic mail messages in real time, and for presenting web documents in a compressed form. Each multimedia element can include text, sound, pictures, animation, program fragments (such as a Java applet, a pointer to a database retrieval engine, or a URL {uniform resource locator}), or a combination or compilation thereof. When a sender enters an abbreviation, an associated multimedia element is transmitted as an electronic chat message or constructed for transmission as an electronic mail message; the choice of associated multimedia element can be responsive to a receiver""s capability, and can be selected at the receiver dynamically in response to user actions (such as time taken to, look at the multimedia element). The sender can also transmit a theme; multimedia objects are presented to the recipient using the sender""s theme, or can be overridden to use a different theme. If the multimedia objects associated with the abbreviations are available at the recipient or at a common server, electronic chat messages, electronic mail messages, and web documents can be compressed and transmitted using only the abbreviations.